“They’d have had to destroy every book,” Tal added.

“They may have,” Elan said. “There’s so little writing left from before the War, and what there is, is hard to follow. My sister—that is, Lady Erra—she found some and sent it to Aredann with me, but half of it was indecipherable. I knew the letters, but I swear I’ve never seen any of those words before.”

“Like this, I’d think,” Tal said, with a slight lilt in his voice that once again reminded Elan that it was a question. Tal pointed at another wall, one where lines of green text covered yellow tiles. The text wasn’t painted on them; it was somehow seared right into the tiles themselves.

Elan had to tilt his head. The text had been written sideways, wrapping from the top to the bottom instead of from side to side, but he could read it well enough. For a moment, he was surprised Tal couldn’t—but of course not. Tal was Closest, and none of them knew how to read. Not even all of the Twill did.

Elan cleared his throat and read aloud, “Here we founded the Well and declared ourselves Wellspring; here our blood was bound together; here we crafted the magic that will protect our descendants. Here our duty to protect our world was sealed with her life. Let us never forget.”

“Well, they’ve certainly been forgotten,” Tal said, wry.

Elan gave a little laugh, even though it wasn’t exactly funny.

“There’s more,” Tal said, and Elan followed him to another wall, but the twisting lines down it were like nothing Elan had ever seen before. He wasn’t even sure they were letters. These were white lines against a blue background, still sharp after all these generations, but if they held any secrets, Elan wouldn’t be the one to guess them.

“I have no idea,” Elan confessed.

“There’s more still,” Tal said.

This was the last wall he hadn’t examined yet. The text here was gold letters over red tiles, and it did look like the strange text from the papers and books Elan had examined. He could read most of the individual letters, but they didn’t spell out anything at all. It was just nonsense, most of it not even pronounceable. There weren’t any vowels, and at the ends of some lines were symbols he’d never seen before. Those looked more like the other wall.

“More history the Highest have stolen from the world,” Elan said. He pressed his hand to the wall, as if that would somehow open his mind to its secrets, and the tiles were cool and smooth under his hand.

“Maybe it’s magic,” Tal said. “Maybe Jae will be able to understand it. This whole place feels important—hidden and protected like this. It must mean something.”

“Let’s go get Jae,” Elan agreed, and he followed as Tal scrambled out. He cast one look back at the vine-covered opening as they left, certain Tal was right. Whatever those other walls said, it was part of the history the Highest had tried so hard to destroy. There had to be a way to figure it out.

Jae sat alone in front of the Well, legs crossed, back straight. She opened her mind to other-vision and plunged her senses into the Well. She could feel the magic, suspended in the glistening energy of the water, and when the Curse closed in around her, she braced herself and pushed it away.

It was easier from here on the shore, where she could work and breathe at the same time, concentrate on making the energy do what she wanted. But she was also farther removed, which made it harder to find the faint traces of the Bloodlines’ magic that were mostly overwhelmed by the Curse.

She sweated in the sunlight as she worked, carefully sifting through the energies. Separating out Curse from water, cringing from the Curse’s painful touch, and then finding the tiny glowing pinpricks that remained of the binding crafted by the Wellspring Bloodlines.

She gathered the glowing specks together, reached out with her mind to get a feel for them, and sensed not only the familiar, easy presence of what she knew was magic crafted by her own ancestors—it felt the same as the fountain had—but also, oddly, the steady and solid feeling of earth.

Curious, she tugged a little on the earth energy around her. Yes, the Well’s binding definitely called on that, too. Earth and water and magic, all bound together by the Bloodlines—

There was a reason they’d called themselves that. Certainty hit her, but she looked within herself anyway. The mages who’d crafted the Well hadn’t just meant that their bloodlines would be their families, their descendants through the generations. They’d meant bloodlines more literally—their blood. Which would be passed down from parent to child. Blood wasn’t as solid as the rocks that had bound the barrier in the desert, but would do the trick—and as long as the Wellspring mages’ descendants lived, the binding would hold, and the magic would continue to work.

But the Curse placed on the mages’ descendants had somehow supplanted the binding, weakening the magic. The more Closest who died, the weaker the magic would get, until it was gone entirely, leaving the Well dry and the world in chaos.

Jae reached out for the remnants of the binding, and could sense, very faintly, the presence of the Closest within them. The binding hadn’t yet eroded entirely—there was still hope for it. She just had to reenergize it, figure out how it had lost its connection to the thousands of Closest who still lived, and rebuild that connection.

She reached out with her mind, remembering the feeling she’d had when she’d broken the Curse. For a moment, she’d had contact with every Closest in the world. All of the Wellspring Bloodlines, bundled together. She was too far away to reach them now. She could feel herself and Tal, but she had only a vague sense of connection to the others.

That would have to be enough. She touched that connection carefully, not fighting or pulling like when she’d battled the Curse, just bringing the essence of the other Closest toward her. Then she reached for what remained of the Well’s binding, pulled that toward herself, too, and tried to mesh the Closest and the binding back together.

For a moment, the lines of energy lit up, tremulous and hesitant. It was working—barely, but the connection was there, joining everything together—

The connection sputtered and faded. Jae grasped desperately for the Closest’s essence again, yanking even though the Closest might feel it physically, and pushed them toward the binding again, harder this time. But her effort still wasn’t enough. The Well was too vast, needed too much to sustain itself. The Well’s magic needed the power of the Bloodlines to keep itself running, but it needed something else, something even more vast, to build that binding.